Tagore biographer par excellence

Martin Kampchen
The Statesman, 5 December

On 26 November, Professor Prasanta Kumar Paul, Rabindranath Tagore’s biographer, died in a Kolkata hospital. In the late 1980s, when I prepared my German biography of Tagore, I first met Paul, whom I have always called Prasantada. He then lived in the annexe to the Ratan Kutir at Santiniketan, shuttling between his college duties in Kolkata and his research at Rabindra Bhavan. He was unassuming, almost rustic looking, without airs. We had many evening meetings in his small room after he returned from the library. He supplied me every detail from Rabindranath’s life I asked for, mostly from memory.

At that time he was sufficiently happy in Santiniketan to want to shift to Visva-Bharati full-time. After becoming professor at Rabindra Bhavan, he first stayed in the university quarters near the Ratan Palli Market and later built a house in the same area. Paul became the person in Santiniketan I admired most. I realised that he rendered help to other Tagore scholars, for example to Andrew Robinson and Krishna Datta, with the same generosity. His dedication and mental application to Tagore and his life's work, the Bengali biography of Rabindranath Tagore, were without equal.

I have seen so many anti-models, namely intellectuals simultaneously engaged in six or more activities, scattering their energies. It rarely leads to a consistent and remarkable oeuvre. Prasantada mildly warned me not to spread myself too much. He alluded to my activities in two Santhal villages at some distance from Santiniketan. He visited me in my modest accommodation at noon one day, and saw me interacting with a few Santhal youths who had arrived from their villages with different suggestions and requests.

He then realised that I was not wasting my time, and he never chided me again. I still remember how he, sitting in a cane chair among these village people, had such a good time exchanging banter with them. He was able to switch from his concerns about Tagore to village concerns without a problem.

I maintain a strict rule of not entertaining visitors before noon. The time before that is reserved for writing. The first time Prasantada visited me, he arrived too early. Courteously, I made him sit on the verandah and returned to my computer until time was up. Rather than being annoyed, he later cited the incident as an example of devotion to duty. Years earlier, another professor who was also made to wait a while, reported me to the police. Here we see the difference between humility and abhimaan (pride). Our relationship intensified when Prasantada and I, as joint editors, brought out the book My Dear Master which contains the correspondence between Tagore and his German translator (from English and Bengali) Helene Meyer-Franck. It is Prasantada's only book in English. He also wrote a long and personal foreword to my Bengali study on Tagore's relationship with Germany, Jarmanite Rabindra-Biksha.

During these years, I was involved in translating Tagore's poems into German. I took the help of friends to read them out to me, to explain the allusions. During that time, I made dozens of visits to Prasantada's house in Ratan Palli where he lived with his family.

He explained lines of poetry to me with their different layers of meaning and offering his explanation in short, considered words. I then realised the hollowness of the critique that Prasanta K Paul's scholarship is confined to being a collector of facts.

He did not merely collect the facts of Tagore’s life and coordinate them chronologically. He sifted and weighed them, put them into perspective and applied a preliminary comment or interpretation. His nine volumes of Rabijibani will be the groundwork for future generations. He knew the importance of his life's work, and that knowledge, I believe, kept him going. He was not well accepted by the Santiniketan establishment. True, Prasantada had his rough edges and could be blunt which may have hurt egos. But why, I ask, could one not accommodate the idiosyncrasies of a scholar of such unique merit? Who in our generation has done as much for making Tagore known to his own people as he has? When he suffered a stroke and it became gradually apparent that he would be unable to complete the 10th volume, it would have been such a gracious gesture to bestow the Desikottama of Visva-Bharati on him. Even the Rabindra Puraskar of the West Bengal government came late in his life, and I remember his childlike joy when he announced it to me. His illness was a burden on him. He sat and sat in his small room, surrounded by shelves of books, computers and a television and other electronic devices. "Are you making any progress," I invariably asked. And he invariably shook his head. "Just a few lines." He felt depressed, and he became more and more lonely. In the last few years, he had hardly any visitors and almost no encouragement from outside his family.

I like to remember Prasantada as he sits on his three-wheeler which was a motorbike with two wheels fitted in the rear. He suffered from gout and was stout, which restricted his mobility. This way, he could climb on his vehicle and start off. I enjoy remembering him as a techno-savvy man who was clever with computers and electronics. This contrasted ingeniously with his old-world charm. I want to remember him as a man who had found his life's work and pursued it writing one volume of Tagore's life after another. I consider him blessed for having discovered what he was born for early in life. On every Bengali New Year and on my birthdays, I used to visit Prasantada in the morning and offer my pranam to him. Alas, how shall I make special my next birthday?